Channel Partner Account Mapping - What's all the Hype?

Managing partnerships is hard.

Managing partnerships without insights into your partner’s customers, accounts, leads, and opportunities makes it even harder.

That’s where account mapping comes into play – giving you and your partner visibility into what’s going on between your account’s statuses, relationships, issues, etc.

So today, we’re going to dive into the ins and out’s of partner account mapping to help you grow your partnership channel and company’s revenue in 2022.

Partner Account Mapping vs. Individual Account Mapping.

Before diving into the nitty-gritty of partner account mapping, we first need to share two standard references to “account mapping”: Individual account mapping & partner account mapping.

Individual Sales Account Mapping.

Individual account mapping is a sales process that helps you identify the key influencers and decision-makers in your prospect's organization and then personalize your outreach to each one.

This approach is fundamental for B2B sales teams because it helps them build relationships with specific individuals on the other side of the table, which can eventually lead to bigger deals.

When individual account mapping, you want to make sure that you're sending emails, scheduling calls, and making introductions with people who have a tangible impact on your deal. You don't want to waste time with people who are just "fans" or low-level influencers because they won't be able to help you move forward with your prospect.

Here are some ways that salespeople can use individual account mapping:

• Identify key influencers within a company (and segment them by function)
• Map out all of your prospects' employees and their roles at their organization (and include their contact information)
• Map out all of your prospects' customers and partners (and have their contact information)

Partner Account Mapping.

Partner account mapping is a powerful tool for channel managers to navigate the complexities of their partnership ecosystem.

Partner account mapping is a novel approach to channel marketing that allows channel managers to capture, engage and grow the right partners to achieve company revenue goals.

It does this by:

• Mapping your partner’s customer, and prospect information with yours
• Understanding the actual value of each partner relationship and overlap in the customer base
• Identifying opportunities for improvement across all areas of the partner ecosystem (e.g., sales performance, customer experience, etc.)

It is designed to create a more relevant and efficient go-to-market motion with partners by understanding their relationship at an account level.

Partner account mapping also captures and centralizes partnership intelligence in one place so that channel managers can apply learnings across other similar partner relationships.

So, What Are the Benefits of Partner Account Mapping?

For businesses to achieve their full potential, they need to partner up with other companies. 

The benefits of these partnerships include gaining access to a larger pool of opportunities, increasing sales to existing accounts, and developing strategic alliances. The trouble is that without proper tracking systems, it can be challenging for companies to leverage these relationships or map out what their partners' customers are doing. 

Achieving a thorough understanding of the companies your partners serve can also streamline sales efforts and help you track how much revenue each partner generates for your company.

So, let’s dive into some of the significant benefits of partner account mapping, shall we?

1. Identify a Larger Pool of Opportunities.

With partnership account mapping, you can identify a larger pool of opportunities. By identifying the right partners and creating an actionable channel sales funnel process that ensures your team is contacting the right prospects at the right time, you will be able to develop a pipeline full of opportunities.

2. Launch More Targeted Co-Marketing Campaigns.

When you understand your customer and prospect match rates with your partners, you can build more targeted co-marketing campaigns together.

Therefore, you can tell a better story about why you and your partners are “better together.”

3. Vet Potential Integration Partnerships.

One of the most important benefits I’ve seen with account mapping is how product and channel managers can vet whether or not they should allocate resources to integration with a new (or existing) partnership.

You can see out of all your partnerships which software your customers use the most based on account mapping, allowing you to prioritize which integration should come first.

4. Develop Strategic Alliances.

Partner mapping is a great way to identify the best partners for your business. Not only does partner mapping help you identify potential partners, but it also helps you identify the right partners for your business.

If you are looking to build strategic alliances with others in your industry, partner mapping can help guide your decisions and make sure you pick the right people with whom to build these partnerships.

3 “Quick Win” Account Mapping Use Cases:

With all this talk about account mapping, let’s finish off with a few quick wins you can take back to your partnership team to start generating some pipeline.

1. Your Prospects Overlap With Your Partner’s Customers.

If you find that one of your partners has a strong customer match rate with your prospects, you should think about the following strategies:

• Ask your partner if they’ll provide you with a few intros to some of the customers you’re working with within the sales process.
• Obtain details about the customer’s current status, issues, and pain points daily.
• Provide your partners with some partner enablement material so they can educate their customers on the benefits of your solution to their problems.

2. Your Prospects Overlap With Your Partner’s Prospects.

When you find that both your target prospects and your partner overlap quite a bit, you should think about the following:

• Launch a creative co-marketing campaign to drive demand for both of your services. You’ll want to be telling the story of how your solutions are “better together.”
• Identify the sales reps at each of your organizations working on the accounts already and begin thinking about ways in which they can co-sell together.

3. Your Customers Overlap With Your Partner’s Customers.

In this case, when you identify that you’ve found a great match rate between your customers and your partner, you can start identifying ways for further expansion:

• New integration features you can upsell to these customers together.
• If you have a customer that’s about to churn, your partner can put in a good word for you during their 1-1 discussions.

How to Map Your Partner Accounts?

There are typically two different ways to map your partner accounts:

Partner Account Mapping Software.

Account mapping software allows you to do away with all of those spreadsheets you’ve built with your partners and automate!

• No more need to update your partners with lead, customer, and opportunity statuses.
• No more poor data sharing practices :)
• No more underperforming co-marketing campaigns
• No more deals lost in the weeds

With a good partner account mapping software, you will be able to:

• Create targeted lists of matched partner customers, prospects, and opportunities.
• Create a list of all their contacts (including email addresses, titles, etc.).
• Automatically update customer and prospect statuses.
• Pipe the data back into your PRM software.

Manually Mapping Partner Accounts.

If you don’t want to spend money on an account mapping software, you can resort to the old fashion way of mapping partner accounts via spreadsheet data!

You can manually map partner accounts by:

1. You and your partners are pulling a report from your customer and prospect data CRM.
2. Add your data to a shared spreadsheet.
3. Run a vlookup/matching formula with all of the data provided.
4. Re-run through steps when changes have been made to the accounts.

Pro tip: You can create a connection between your CRM and Google Sheets to update the data if you’d like automatically.

You should note that although this is the cheaper route for account mapping, you will also be running into issues such as:

• Security risk with valuable customer data
• Dirty data uploaded by multiple partners
• Load time of account matching can be quite long

Wrapping it All Up

Partner account mapping can be a beneficial process for deciding who your partners will be. You should use these accounts to help you understand how the partner is performing and whether you want to pursue a partnership. But partnership account mapping isn't just for use after you've signed clients. 

You can use it in conjunction with your work on the sales process to ensure that you're only going after companies that are a good fit for your particular business. Use this list as a resource for your own business, and if you have any questions about what we're presenting here, feel free to contact us.